June 28, 2013

The Morning Wrap

The long game: From the front-page of today's New York Times: "Viewed in isolation, the Supreme Court term that just ended had elements of modesty. The court declined to do away with affirmative action, gave Congress another shot at salvaging the Voting Rights Act and refused to find a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. But glancing at an end-of term snapshot can be misleading." The Washington Posthas this report: "A conservative Supreme Court swerves to avoid easy definition." The Post also reports that Attorney General Eric Holder Jr., who overruled top Justice Department lawyers concerning whether to support the Defense of Marriage Act, feels vindicated after the high court ruling this week.

The 2013 A-List: Check out The American Lawyer'sannual assessment of Am Law 200 law firms based on scores that combine each firm's annual survey rank in four areas: financial performance, pro bono, diversity and associate satisfaction. In addition to producing the annual Top 20 ranking, The American Lawyer takes a ten-year look at the A-List. Only four firms have made the list every time since it began in 2003: Davis Polk & Wardwell, Debevoise & Plimpton, Latham & Watkins, and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.

Reassigned: A federal trial judge in Ohio who twice sentenced a man in a child pornography case to a day in prison--despite being overturned after the first time--will not preside over the case when it returns for a new sentencing, a federal appeals court said. “If I have got to send somebody like Mr. [Richard] Bistline to prison, I’m sorry, someone else will have to do it. I’m not going to do it,” the judge said after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit vacated the first one-day sentence.

Investigated:The Washington Postreports today: "A retired four-star Marine Corps general who served as the nation’s second-ranking military officer is a target of a Justice Department investigation into a leak of information about a covert U.S.-Israeli cyberattack on Iran’s nuclear program, a senior Obama administration official said."

Watching you: "A deeply divided state Court of Appeals held yesterday that the government can attach a GPS tracking device to a public employee's personal vehicle without a warrant, establishing what three judges called a "dangerous precedent," The New York Law Journalreports today.

Fakes: More than 1,000 people have been jailed for robbing drug stash houses that didn't exist, a USA Today investigation found. According to the report: "The ploy has quietly become a key part of the ATF's crime-fighting arsenal, but also a controversial one: The stings are so aggressive and costly that some prosecutors have refused to allow them. They skirt the boundaries of entrapment, and in the past decade they have left at least seven suspects dead."

Indicted:The National Law Journalreports today: Indictment Gives Clues to Boston Marathon Bombing Motive." More coverage here in The New York Times on the charges brought against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Yes We Scan: In today'sLos Angeles Times: "Shepard Fairey approves of NSA parodies of his Obama 'Hope' poster." The report begins with: "In the weeks since renegade National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the U.S. government is harvesting phone and online data, a humorous series of Internet memes has been taking comic aim at artist Shepard Fairey's famous "Hope" image of Barack Obama."